"Everybody is part of the problem and everybody can be part of the solution." said Project Kaisei co-founder Mary Crowley, who spoke at a press conference Wednesday about the research efforts aboard the Japanese brigantine research vessel Kaisei. It's currently docked at Britannia Heritage Shipyard and will remain here for this weekend's Richmond Maritime Festival before departing next week.
Crowley, in town with the visiting Kaisei to raise awareness about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, said that although scientists don't know for sure, the plastic vortex is thought to be the size of the state of Texas, perhaps twice as large.
It consists of discarded plastic detergent bottles, water bottles, and other everyday plastic objects.
"It's like looking at your own garbage, spread out through the ocean," she told reporters.
"You can see a lot of sea life is ingesting the plastic," Crowley said, explaining a video she presented which shows that plastic containers slowly break up into smaller pieces, and some are eventually ingested by sea life, such as jelly fish.
Aside from killing marine life, researchers fear the plastic is entering the human food chain, something researchers hope to verify and demonstrate.
Crowley said the floating garbage patch continues to grow "due to poor waste management practices on land and sea."
Rather than one solid floating mass, she described the oceanic debris field as "like an archipelago of little islands."
Coun. Harold Steves urged consumers to do their part and stop drinking bottled water, and said hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on infrastructure to make Lower Mainland tap water clean and safe.
He wondered why thermoses and paper grocery bags are less trendy today.
"The insidious thing about plastics is that it lasts for hundreds of years," he said. "We need to make using thermoses cool again."
According to the Ocean Voyages Institute, only about five per cent of the world's plastics are recycled.
With 260 million tons of plastic produced globally each year, Crowley fears the garbage patch could double in size in the next decade.
The Kaisei departed San Francisco on July 4 and about 300 miles off the coast of Washington and Oregon made a shocking discovery: a massive amount of debris thought to have originated from the tsunami in Japan and that's been heading towards North America's west coast since March 11, 2011.
Crowley hoped that media coverage about the advancing debris field from Japan's tsunami would raise awareness about the problem of garbage congesting the Pacific Ocean.
Mary Crowley, Executive Director and founder of the Ocean Voyages Institute, steers the tall ship Kaisei, which has just returned from the North Pacific where crew members tracked and salvaged manmade debris found floating in the area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. (CARMINE MARINELLI/ 24 HOURS)There's a massive vortex of plastic debris growing daily in the Pacific Ocean, a mountainous problem that will require an equally immense global effort to find the solution.
The broken down carbon black and steel wires are discharged by the auto discharging machine into the carbon black conveyor, and the steel wires are seperated from the carbon black with the magnetic selector.
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